A Republican Assault on the Rich … Wait. What?

The GOP presidential race now officially has fallen down the rabbit hole into "Alice in Wonderland," everything-would-be-what-it-isn't territory. Ronald Reagan's famous 11th commandment — "Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican" — is in tatters.

Debuting yesterday in South Carolina was a 27-minute documentary-style campaign film that attacks GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney for being a job-destroying capitalist greedhead.

The film, "King of Bain: When Mitt Romney Came to Town," was independently produced and shopped around the GOP presidential field. Recently an independent super PAC called Winning Our Future, run by a former aide to Romney rival Newt Gingrich, bought it.

The money came from $5 million donated to the super PAC by Sheldon Adelson, an ultra-conservative Gingrich pal and Las Vegas and Asian casino magnate — just the type of guy evangelical voters would embrace. The script reads as if it had been written by Occupy Wall Street or Michael Moore:

"Capitalism made America great," intones the solemn narrator. "Free markets, innovation, hard work — the building blocks of the American Dream. But in the wrong hands, some of those dreams can turn into nightmares. This film is about one raider and his firm and how they destroyed that dream for thousands of Americans and their families — Mitt Romney and Bain Capital."

The film goes on from there, interviewing workers who lost their jobs after Bain Capital took over their companies.

Bain Capital is the private equity firm Romney co-founded and ran before being elected governor of Massachusetts in 2002.

Predictably, they are bitter. "They could (not) care less about us, the way I see it," says one woman. "We had to load up the U-Haul because we done lost our home."

Another person said that Romney "is going to look out for the money people. He didn't look out for us little peons, anyway."

The film's narrator helpfully points out that some of Bain's investors were "Latin American" and includes video of Romney's now famous "Corporations are people, my friend" line on the campaign trail.

Some observations:

— You let a bomb-thrower of Newt Gingrich's pedigree into the presidential field, and this is what happens. Angry that a pro-Romney super PAC sabotaged his campaign in Iowa, this film is Gingrich's revenge. The "independent" pro-Gingrich group is planning to spend $3.4 million to saturate South Carolina with film clips ahead of that state's Jan. 21 primary.

— The uproar speaks to the bipolar nature of the GOP. For years, big-money, scorched-earth capitalists have flim-flammed white working-class Americans into thinking that somehow, they shared common interests.

There's a reason that income inequality is out of sight and the middle class is disappearing. Anyone who thinks Mitt Romney, or for that matter, Newt Gingrich, will fix that is in Wonderland with Alice.

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